


Manic Pixie Soldier-Assassin

by vyatka



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Assassins & Hitmen, Dark Comedy, Gen, Implied Relationships, Mental Instability, POV First Person, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Suicidal Thoughts, Trope Subversion/Inversion, buckynat is the implied relationship, that tumblr post thats like ''opposite of manic pixie dream girl. depressed goblin nightmare man''
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-25 08:56:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17722106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: Have you ever seen a bird's eyes? Nothing has less empathy, except for me. Look a bird in the eye and be forced to contend with the worthlessness of your own existence.





	Manic Pixie Soldier-Assassin

I am an assassin. 

It is important to know this about me, or else you might wonder what sort of person spends so much time on rooftops and goes about with so many weapons. You might wonder what sort of person wears a muzzle and has an arm made all of metal, and then you will be so caught up in wondering that you will not listen to anything I have to say. 

I have many things to say, and I never lie. 

 ***

Because I am beautiful and awful, I am used to the weight of stares. I am looked at wherever I go. Spies are capable of inconspicuousness, but I am not a spy, and I fail to blend into a crowd; it doesn't matter, since most of my work takes place in the shadows. I am looked at by everyone. Other operatives. Technicians, medics, handlers. 

The German cashier may stare at me partially because of the fine spray of blood that has hardened and blackened into inkstains on my skin, but I think it is mostly because I am beautiful, and not the blood or the armor underneath my parka - heavy Kevlar and leather, straps and buckles, harness and surcingle - or the fact that my work recently made the news. I shoot my eyebrows up at the tiny box of a television behind his head, where subtitles unspool an announcement of a well-known politician's untimely death. 

"He was trying to flee the country," I tell the cashier, and gesture at the screen. 

The cashier turns back to me and shuffles his elbow over a pamphlet advertising cures for male pattern baldness. "Looks that way," he says. 

"You're going bald," I observe. 

He blushes and pushes it under a magazine. "It's not for me," he says, and if I could raise one eyebrow in skepticism I would, but my eyebrows do not operate as independent agents, so I give him a sly sideward look and put one of my small bags of pastry in my teeth so that I can shuffle the others up my hands. I give the TV a last glance. I am very good at what I do. Someone else will probably be framed, and I'll have to kill them, too, before anyone can figure it out. 

I leave and remove the bag from my teeth and remove the bread from inside, steaming and fresh, and bite into it and sweep up the crumbs with my tongue, and spook a few pedestrians with my eyes. 

My eyes tend to do that. 

Had I had a free hand, I would have deployed it to retrieve the pair of sunglasses that live in my pocket to protect from the chill of my gaze, but my hands are more importantly occupied - with FOOD - and my mind is more importantly occupied - with the mission - and I figure it will toughen them to force them to endure a fleeting lighthouse-sweep from my horrifying eyeballs. To look at the way passersby react to the sight of them, one would think I walk around with one hanging from the socket and the other scratched to a red pulp and smeared across my cheek. 

Which, I admit, is not so far off. My eyes may not be gory or mutilated, but they are dead. 

Truly - my eyes are vacant, soulless and staring, with the stark lack of feeling that belongs to murderers and sharks. And birds. (Have you ever seen a bird's eyes? Nothing has less empathy, except for me. Look a bird in the eye and be forced to contend with the worthlessness of your own existence.) They are piercing, cold and desolate as Siberia, and I have tried to force expression into them with dismal results. They refuse to hold emotion. Like sieves, anything I pour into them drains right back out. 

 ***

"This was a two-day mission you've already stretched into three," says Slates. 

There are two kinds of handlers on the rotating roster of men and one woman who have been cleared to run me - the ones who have extensive experience in the field, and the ones whose youthful confidence hasn't yet been shaken. The latter kind earned their clearance in seedier ways, and although I don't know what seedy methods twenty-one year old Jasper Slates employed to get where he is, I have guesses. He's a slim, hard little man of about five-eight, black-haired and gray-eyed, and young as he is, he's levelheaded and very good with a knife, and could rise very high someday. If he lives that long. We can't know until something undercuts that smug fearlessness of his. The first time he gets shot might do it. 

I consider shooting him to speed up the process. 

I won't. I would never shoot a teammate, as tempting as it occasionally is. Other operatives have a habit of talking about me like I'm neither there nor listening, offhand remarks that range from insensitive to cruel, that awful, queasy realization that you are being mocked behind your back from only a few feet away. I have scooped bullets out of my organs and sawed through my ligaments and dislocated my joints with matter-of-fact choruses of snaps, and I can abide it all, but I have never been able to abide teasing. Being laughed at hits me like antiseptic hits infection. It burns. It bubbles. But I don't react, outside of my head. I am a gargoyle. Jut-toothed, hunching, unbotherable, made of stone. 

(Except my teeth do not jut. I have good teeth, albeit uneven on top. And I think what I am picturing is a  _grotesque,_ not a gargoyle. Gargoyles have a fountain function. I mostly don't.) 

Slates is visibly winding down, waiting for a response, and I realize I tuned out after the first sentence. Oh, no. In classic interrogation-avoidance technique, I reach for my cooling pastry, wondering if I can come up with something to say while I'm chewing. 

Slates moves it out of my reach. "Answer," he says, his voice chilled. 

If he wants chill, there is no one more suited than me. I slouch down in the nice chair at the nice dining table that this nice Berlin hotel has furnished me with (and that's not sarcasm - hotels are a rare treat for me, and nice hotels even rarer) and flick him a look of icewater sullenness that has induced flinches in better men than him. 

I get the flinch I wanted, but he doesn't back down. "What's taking you so long, Soldier?" 

"I like Berlin," I rasp. 

"This was a forty-eight hour assignment." 

He's holding my food hostage. "The other target is more difficult," I say. "She'll take longer." 

"How much longer?" 

I shrug. I have now jaunted over the line from 'acceptable level of insolence' to 'punishable level of insolence' and am prancing my way toward stomach-roiling disciplinary action. "I don't know," I say primly. 

Slates gives me a hard look. That's nice of him, or else it's cowardly. I was expecting to be hit. I'm expecting him at least to say something else. But he just gives me that hard, unsmiling look that could someday weather to sternness but for now fails to intimidate on his smooth young face, and I stare back, and we pass into that length of look that silently marks the battle line of a staring contest, which I will win if he allows it to go on, but he cuts it short and clears his throat. 

"One more day," he says. 

I relinquish and nod. "Okay." 

"Don't make me call anyone," he says, and that's almost enough to make me afraid. I crunch it down and hold it in my teeth like a rabbit's neck, and watch unblinking while he leaves. 

 ***

"You're going to have to do it eventually," says the kitten. Orange tabby, gigantic amber eyes, little little claws tangled up in a ball of Soviet-red yarn. I move my head away from the scope of the rifle and blink at it, because cats don't talk (much to my chagrin) and this one just manifested out of nowhere. It must be in my head. 

"I know," I say. 

"You're going to have to do it now," the kitten says, rolling over, unwrapping a hind foot from the skein. 

I grunt. "Go away." 

I shift, on my belly against the rooftop. Hours I've been here, waiting to slip into the hunting trance, like a crocodile lurking in the reeds with just eyes and nostrils above the water, but it won't come. It can't be forced, either, so I have been here, tearing up from the wind, doing the mental equivalent of tossing and turning. 

I hate it. The absence of feeling is the only feeling I can stand, but there is a presence in me, emotions rolling over each other, devouring. My insides are pits of ourobouri, and I can't remember  _why._

I almost can. 

It goes against the grain of all training to close my eyes while I am in position to kill, but I do it anyway, quickly. If only I could fall asleep. 

What I do in cryo is not sleeping. Floating in gray nothingness-lull is not the same as sleeping. It's not taxing, but it's not restful. I haven't dreamed for as long as I can remember. 

I lick my lips. I hum. 

Is it vile of me to wish that they had cleaned out my memory more thoroughly than they did? Sometimes I want to beg for it -  _please, wipe me clean like a hard drive! Empty out my head, baby! -_ but i can't bring myself. Animal self-preservation has its hooks in me despite my best efforts. Like all people do, I get in those dark marionette moods, the dangerous kind that lead to leaning over precipices on one foot, smiling white in the non-dark of the city, a few hundred feet above traffic.  _I could lean too far and fall, and would that be the worst thing?_ I would scream on the way down, because you can't help it. You can't fall silently. I have tilted on balconies and toed the edge of rooftops and offered up my existence to the wind like a handful of sand. If I choose how I die, it will be falling. No guns, not for me. 

But I won't do it. 

For one, I am not certain it would kill me. I am very durable. And if I were to survive, the punishment would be worse than anything I can imagine, I am sure, and I can imagine a lot. I once watched a rat eat through a man's stomach. For two, I don't really want to die. After all, I have made it this far - to quit now seems pathetic. Why break the streak? 

I glance down. The drop from this rooftop would barely dent me. The most it would do is give me a headache. 

"Thinking about killing yourself again?" says the kitten, now on my shoulder. It's not real, and yet I can feel the needlepricks of her claws against my neck. 

And then it's not a kitten. It's a spider, but the prickle is the same. My mind has simply adjusted it to be from the spider's legs. She climbs slowly up my neck, over my ear. 

"Don't kill yourself," she whispers. "Моя звезда - " 

 ***

Minds. They certainly do their best to protect us. It's not their fault that the horror of the world surpasses their abilities. Like mothers, our brains do their best to soothe, to safeguard. They pull curtains over trauma and tuck it away. They vacuum up the monsters, but the monsters are too big and too terrible, and trauma squelches out the sides of the drawers. 

"How could you  _miss_ the shot?" 

He's right. I never miss. 

My mind does its best to pull the curtains on what comes next. 

 ***

_Empty out my head, baby!_

 ***

Ukraine. 

My favorite feeling is the absence of feeling, and as the technician tightens the straps of my armor, I slowly take a breath, maximum capacity, and hold it. 

As soon as they are fastened, I let it out. Just as slowly - a big gust will tip him off. They always tighten the thing like a corset, in severe jerks, as if they want my ribs cinched in. No, thank you. My waistline is pleasing without leather squeezing my organs together. On the exhale, the straps loosen enough that I can fit three fingers between them. 

The technician, turning back, notices. "How does this keep happening?" He says to himself, and it is a good thing I am muzzled, or else he would notice my mad-dog grin. I am so funny. 

 ***

The target is clever and cunning and dangerous. They don't let me pursue her on my own, and that is strange. This is a dual mission; kill the engineer she is trying to protect, and kill her, too. 

Outside of Odessa, I shoot out her tires and they go over, and a dull poke of surprise penetrates my raptor unfeelingness, because I was expecting more of a fight. I even suffered to be strapped into my armor the suffocating way it is intended to fit, anticipating combat. 

She isn't dead. 

Redheaded and coughing and crawling, she hauls her charge from the wreckage, the two of them suffusing through the cloud of dust and fumes, and in the moment that their bodies overlap, I line up my sights and shoot. 

 ***

 _I shot them both,_ I say sleekly later, with an extra layer of preen to spackle over the churning in my belly.

I am believed. 

After all. I am beautiful and awful, and I never lie. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know fandom as a rule hates first person narration, but this was an experiment in two things: 
> 
> a) whether I could write anything compelling in first person  
> b) whether I could apply the "cutesy killer" trope to a male character and make it convincing 
> 
> I'm a big fan of the "adorable psychopath" character, but it's a gendered trope, probably because it is often a branch-off of the manic pixie dream girl. Villanelle from _Codename: Villanelle/Killing Eve_ , Harley Quinn, and Bart Curlish of _Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency_ are great examples. Since there's really no equivalent of the manic pixie dream girl trope for men, there are few male examples of the cute n' crazy murderer. Anyway. I just wanted to explore it. 
> 
> Please comment/kudos if you enjoyed! 
> 
> I'm also on [Tumblr](http://soldatka.tumblr.com/).


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